Bilingualism in Canada

"Every time you look at the world and life and humanity through the key, which is language, you discover another profile, another vision of the same world & So, learning another language makes you bigger, gives you a wider vision, makes you feel subtleties that you don't get in one language." --Antonine Maillet

On July 6, Canada's national radio and television network carried the story of Yvon Tessier and his guide dog Pavot, an athletic black Labrador. The two arrived at the University of New Brunswick for a five-week English immersion course for Mr. Tessier and a normal working assignment for Pavot. Although the university has offered the program for the last 50 years, it gave the thumbs-down to Mr. Tessier and Pavot, arguing that the dog understands commands only in French and that any French words would spoil the course's success. There was nothing for it: Pavot must study English for two months before master and dog could return to the university.

This amusing anecdote conveys more, of course, than the tribulations of a French-speaking man and his French-obeying hound. As both Canada and the United States become more ethnically diverse, they are also becoming more linguistically diverse. Like Europe, Asia, and Africa, we can hear a babel of languages on street corners, radio, and television, if not always in legislative proceedings. Pavot's story, it seems, shows how institutional and official culture can lag behind the public -- and it suggests that only a spirit of curiosity, flexibility, and inclusiveness can overcome conflict and ensure the rights of minority language groups.

Another anecdote, also from July, is somewhat less amusing. A union of workers at the University of British Columbia has filed a complaint against the school with the B.C. Human Rights Commissioner, charging that a supervisor, on hearing a conversation in Serbo-Croatian between two members of the cleaning staff, told them to stop, claiming that UBC's policy was English-only on campus. The case is now in arbitration.

In Canada, we have long been committed to bilingualism and biculturalism in two European languages, English and French, and we are now attempting to expand that initial idea to multiculturalism. What our experience in doing so demonstrates is the need for enlightened legislation, language training and exchange programs, and the positive representation of different language groups in both history texts and the media.

In the 1960s, a revolution found political expression in Quebec, Canada's mainly French-speaking province, whose inhabitants had been ordered for years by their Anglo employers to "speak white." This "Quiet Revolution," which ultimately established French as the official language of Quebec, reflected a long-held desire to be maîtres chez nous, masters in their own house.

But persistent, difficult questions remained, and in 1965-66, at the Ottawa offices of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, they were made explicit. Was Quebec really un pays, a country? How should Canada respond? What did Quebec really want? How to address its demands? Would the rest of the provinces agree to give Quebec powers shared by no other province? Would special powers predicate separation? Would separation mean partition? Would partition signal economic ruin? What of the status of Canada's aboriginal peoples, including Canada's First Nations? Were they not here first, long before Samuel Champlain built Port Royal and founded the Order of Good Cheer? How to deal with the growing number of Canadians from countries such as the Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, The Netherlands, and Latvia, whose mother tongue was neither English nor French?

Eventually, the Commission decided that the French and the English constituted the two founding nations and made these the two official languages, but it thereby gave its stamp to an inaccurate and unfair notion of Canada's ethnic past. The Inuit, the Dene, the Cree, the Iroquois, the Mohawks, the Onandaga, the Ojibway, the Métis, and other aboriginal groups were, as they say, pipped at the post. Thus, this solution to the "Quebec Problem" not only did little to address Quebec's political aspirations, but it left the aboriginals and "multicults" to fumble in the dark for their coats. Although the government's agenda has included improved living conditions and justice administration for native Canadians, in the absence of formal policies to preserve aboriginal languages, natives themselves have had to try to their best. "The history and culture cannot be saved in English," wrote the late educator P. C. Paul. "It can be saved only in our language."

Nevertheless, official bilingualism and biculturalism have broadened to encompass a larger principle: appreciation of and respect for multiculturalism (even though it's not always so clear how to translate this principle into action). A February 2004 Environics poll, undertaken for the Centre for Research and Information on Canada (CRIC) found that English-speaking Canadians outside Quebec embrace official bilingualism as part of their Canadian identity. These Canadians also believe that a) learning to speak French helps keep the country together; b) learning a second language is fulfilling; and c) a respect for bilingualism and biculturalism easily translates into appreciation for diversity. In another CRIC study, "The New Canada Revisited" (July 2004), only 31 per cent of respondents agreed with the proposition that: "A country is in which everyone speaks the same language and has similar ethnic and religious backgrounds is preferable to a country in which people speak different languages and have different ethnic and religious backgrounds," as compared to 68 per cent who disagreed.

It appears that bilingualism and, increasingly, an acceptance of ethnic and linguistic diversity, have become a point of Canadian national pride.

For decades, staid Canadians have secretly envied the overflowing expression of American patriotism, especially when great Canadian opinion leaders such as Marshall McLuhan opine: "Canada has no identity and never has had an identity; any sense of identity we have is our sense of density." Yet Maple-Leaf wavers have been known to burst into uncontrollable tears as they sing their official national anthem. And, bilingual or not, they seem to agree with the words on a T-shirt, worn in the western city of Edmonton: "I know I'm not perfect, but I'm a Canadian (which is close enough.)."

The United States has its own tradition of taking national pride in a multi-ethnic immigrant history. That pride, however, must involve more than rhetoric. It should entail a broad institutional and political recognition of linguistic diversity. It should also recognize that productive change takes time and patience, that Babel was not built in a day.

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